Sheep Guarding Llama

Friday.  Today we decided to make a “stay in all day” day.  We had planned to do a grocery trip today but no one, except for Luciana, felt like going out.  (This ended up turning into an experiment in “how long can we go without a real trip to the big grocery store.”)

Today is exactly one quarter of a century after the great ice storm that devastated western New York when I was in high school.  It was my sophomore year at York Central School and we ended up having two weeks off from school due to the incredible amount of ice causing the power to be out at the school for that whole time.  We lost one third of all of the trees around the area.  That was the storm that would instantly change the woods of my childhood.

At the time, in 1991, the storm’s impact was one of fallen trees, dangerous roads and no school.  But now, as an adult looking back on it, it was the moment that the woods that I had grown up knowing “disappeared” to me.  Ever since I was really little, going into our woods was a normal thing.  I can remember the paths, the meadows, the ponds and more so well, even today.  There was a whole field of black eyed susans hidden back there and I knew exactly how to get there.  I knew every path, including deer paths that led through the northern fringe of the wood and had wide open areas that went along a field and would sneak you into different points along the big pond that was hidden deep in the woods.  I had camp outs, picnics, parties, horse rides, wagon rides and more back in those woods.  They were a huge part of my childhood.  When I think of myself being young, those woods feature prominently in my memory.

After this storm, the woods were gone.  Not that they did not exist, but they were changed.  The trees came down and the paths were blocked.  Nothing looked the same and everything changed.  Because the ice storm was in March it would be a long time before the woods would have been entered again and by the time that it was, nothing was similar.  It never recovered.  We never really got it back to the way that it was. And nature takes over so quickly.  In no time the paths, meadows and copses were dramatically changed.  It seemed minor then, so we didn’t go into the woods like we used to.  But over time the behaviour changed.  What used to be the place for afternoon walks was sort of gone.  Not gone in a dramatic “you can never go in there again” sort of way, but just enough that you never did.  And as we stopped using it, nature took over more and more.  The paths that we used to mow grew over, first with weeds them with trees and eventually disappeared.

I got up and started writing but Luciana was up soon and asked if I would play some games with her. So we started the day with Goat Simulator and Sega All Stars Racing.  At this point we have managed to earn all but the final course in the game.

Most of the day was spent writing, but I did knock off on the early side to get more time with the kids.

The weekend sale on Steam is from Square Enix with all of the Final Fantasy games on sale.  We already have nearly all of them, but the exciting news is that the classic Final Fantasy IX has been announced for the PC and will be available in the next three months.  They are slowly getting all of the titles re-released, which is pretty awesome.  Next year is the thirtieth anniversary of the series.

I played some Final Fantasy III with the girls tonight.  They wanted to do something together so we climbed into the game room as it is Friday night and Dominica did not feel like playing a game with us but wanted to just read in the living room.  Luciana had seen Final Fantasy V‘s icon on Steam that has chocobo racing on it and said that she wanted to play that.  I talked them into trying FF3, which is the oldest of the FF titles that is currently available on Steam, so that we could “start from the beginning” instead.  It took a bit but once I fired it up and they watched the intro they were hooked.  Like really, seriously into the game.  They were so excited and had a great time playing it for more than an hour.  This is their first time really playing a JRPG of any sort.

It’s been most of a decade since I last played FF3, I had played the remake (on which this version is based) on the Nintendo DS handheld system.  This is way better.  The graphics have been updated and playing on the big screen is so much more comfortable.  And some stuff has been added, like the intro that looks like a full budget movie.  FF3 was originally from the old 8bit Nintendo NES circa 1990 and was not released in the US for a very long time, it was one of the FF titles that was held back for non-US customers only for a very long time.  So my play through on the Nintendo DS was my first time ever.

We had a great time playing together, the girls made me promise that we would get up and continue playing this one tomorrow.

Today is the first day of Carnival here in the Orthodox party of the world that uses the older Julian calendar system.  It throws everyone off back home as everyone is used to the Catholic calendar where Carnival is already over.

Worked all day, lots of writing and posting.  Early this evening, Liesl and I walked down to the corner store to do some quick shopping.  She was excited to go for the walk with me.

We made it barely to the corner and the street (the little old alley that is) was filled with a dozen loud teenagers, all in full Halloween costumes (they even said Happy Halloween) who were clearly headed from one party to another.  They stopped and talked to Liesl.  She was quite shy, though.

Luciana has gotten into our Sega and Sonic All Stars Racing game on Steam and we did several races this morning.  We have figured out how we get points and how we can use them to get additional courses and stuff.  Both girls are enjoying that a lot.  We have so few local co-op games, finding a new one like this is a really big deal.

The costumes were far more like those from my childhood and nothing like what you would see in America these days.  The costumes were what I would call traditional and most had full face masks.

Dinner today was giant, chocolate filled croissants.  They are  a Greek thing.  They sell them absolutely everywhere.  Every grocery store, every gas station, ever stand.  It’s like the standard snack food.  They come filled with chocolate, hazlenut creme or even a strawberry cheese blend.  They are always individually packaged and unlike in places like Spain or France they are not normally made locally but are made up on the mainland and sealed.  A surprising thing to be so standard, and from so many vendors, in Greece.  But boy are they cheap and delicious.  You can get a normal one for a Euro and this enormous ones for about a Euro sixty.

Dominica and I each had one of these and called it dinner.  The lady who runs the corner store told me that Greeks put them into the oven and warm them up before eating them.  So I heated them up tonight and they were even better than usual.

Dominica and I decided to spent the evening playing some video games.  The girls both decided that they wanted to just hang out on their own without us, so this worked out easily.  Liesl was watching videos and Luciana playing Minecraft most of the evening.

Dominica and I put in Bookwork Adventures, which is a cheesy but fun word puzzle game, the second in its series, and ended up playing for about four hours!  We managed to complete the entire first “book” of the game which is the one that takes place in classic Greece.  It made for a nice “evening.”  It made the time pass really quickly and without realizing it we were up until four thirty in the morning!!

While Dominica and I were playing games, maybe around midnight, I heard a lot of wind rumbling the house.  I ran and looked out back and for the first time in two weeks at least, we had a significant amount of rain.  Sadly, the windows in the car were down, so Liesl and I threw on shoes and coats and ran down to the centre of town to roll up the windows on the car.  It turned out to be pretty dry, but we were not.  We were quite wet by the time that we got back to the house.

On the way back up to the house, from my Facebook update… Liesl and I got caught out in the rain. It was a cool, light rain. We were down making sure that car windows were closed. On the way back in a dark, narrow allow between old stone houses, while looking at the dark ground…. we were both completely blinded like never before as a singular lightning strike hit so close that even with the reflected light making to the ground between the buildings and bounces back at us, both of us has full optical nerve saturation and saw nothing but white. It’s been ten minutes and my eyes are still sore. Dominica was in the house and could not believe how loud it was. We must have been within 100m of the strike. I’ve never in my life had lighting take my vision completely out like that.

Mostly a busy writing and posting day.  Wednesdays are always my busiest day, along with Tuesdays.  I tend to really be focused at my desk most of those two days.  We didn’t really do anything today.

We lost power a few times today.  Never for very long.  It is always a bit annoying but we have never lost power at a time when it was really a problem.

After my check in call this evening, the girls and I played Supreme League of Patriots for a while on Steam.  That was our relaxation tonight.  It’s a fun comic style point and click adventure game.  It is good for the girls as the controls are pretty simple and there isn’t any way to get stuck or create a disaster.  So they enjoy taking control while we play.  The only problem is that it causes the game to move along incredibly slowly so I tend to start to fall asleep while we are playing.

I have figured out how to put a Steam walkthrough for a game into the background and use the Steam Controller to flip back and forth while we play.  It makes things work much better on the Steam gaming system.  This is especially important for us because we can’t use phones or tablets in the game room because the wifi cannot reach anywhere that we sit but the laptop sits on a table in the middle of the room with a line of sight through the doorway up to where the wireless access point is on my desk up in the loft.  So that works decently well.  I will have to get a picture of that setup so that we remember it when we are no longer living here.  It is an interesting one, for sure.  Who knows when we are going to get such a good gaming setup again.

Hard to believe that it is March already.  This winter seems like it never happened.  It really feels like we just got to Greece.

Today the weather was super nice so I took my laptop and unplugged and headed up top to the terrace and sat outside for a few hours and enjoyed the weather and the fresh air and the sunshine and the vistas while I did some writing.  It was not as productive as I would have hoped as the sun was quite bright and even under the overhang I found it to be very fatiguing on my eyes.  I ended up only staying outside for a few hours and came back into the house on the early side to switch back to the normal desk where the chair is more comfortable and the sun does not continuously blind me.

Did a NodeBB 0.9.3 to NodeBB 0.9.4 upgrade today.  Very minor and was quick and smooth.  We are getting our processes better and better and it is getting very easy to keep MangoLassi up all of the time (knock on wood.)

In the evenings, mostly while we eat dinner, Dominica and I have been watching Hot in Cleveland.  It is one of our favourite sitcoms and we watch it on Hulu.  When it was first released we watched it all of the time but after something like three seasons they stopped appearing on Hulu and that was that.  We thought that they had dropped it.  Then just recently we discovered that many more seasons had been added to Hulu, so we are now several years behind and working to catch up.  It is one of the very few shows that we watch and really enjoy.  It is very much a classic 1980s or 1990s style sitcom.  Great writing, acting and premise.  Exactly the kind of show that we really miss.

Liesl started playing the game Haunt the House today.  It is a cute little game that she knows from her YouTube video game shows.  She had a good time learning that tonight.  This was one of those many “I know this game and… oh wait you mean we already own it” games.

After yesterday’s frustrating attempt at going to see Knossos, today we took the time to relax a bit as a family and spent much of it in the game room playing video games together.  It was a really nice day, we all enjoyed it a lot.

Dominica and I started in on Highrise Heroes as soon as we got up.  We are determined to beat this game.  We love it, but it is really, really hard towards the end.  The game “tricks” you with thinking that there are 100 levels, then you get reminded that it is not an American game and they start number with zero, so there should be 101.  Then you go into the basement and there turns out to be something like 121 levels.  The story was interesting and we mostly liked the ending and are definitely hoping for a sequel.  Fallen Tree Games (who also make the Quell series) are known for making sequels to puzzle games so we are hopeful that this one will be getting a sequel (or two), too.

One of the things that we really enjoyed on Highrise Heroes was that at the end of every level you received your global ranking so that you could see how you were doing, not just in comparison to yourself but against everyone, everywhere.  That made for a lot of fun and we knew that if we were in the top one hundred players in the world that we were doing well and on nearly all levels we were in the top eight and on some we were in the teens!!

Liesl wanted to play a game so Dominica and she played Scribblenauts Unlimited which was a perfect game for them (it is only a one player game, Dominica was helping Liesl play) as it is a fun, word puzzle cartoon game definitely meant for kids.  They played that for quite a while and had a lot of fun (and a lot of arguing because that’s how they are.)

Liesl played Castaway Paradise for quite a while today.  She did really well and is nearly ready to become a “VIP”.  One more good day of playing and she will make it to the VIP levels for sure.

This evening we talked the girls, cajoled is probably more accurate, into watching the pilot of Star Trek: The Next Generation with us.  That’s the double feature “Mission to Farpoint” episode that is nearly two hours long, it is essentially a made for TV movie.  On Netflix the two episodes are merged into one.  You can’t even tell where the separation was supposed to happen.

The girls kind of liked it.  I thought that for sure that Liesl would love it but she mostly just put up with it.  Luciana said that she really liked it, though.  But, I suppose, I was around Luciana’s age when I first started watching the original Star Trek with my dad.

For family game night tonight, after our show, we settled in and played Telltale Games’ Jurassic Park.  We have not played that game since we tested it out while we were in Nicaragua.  It’s a really cool game that takes place during the first movie, using different characters in the park while the movie is going on.  It is a really neat idea and tells more of the story of the movie.  Very well done and totally makes you feel like you are taking part in the movie.  But it is also very high stress and hard to play for any length of time.  It is quite taxing and I am the only one that can handle having the controls.  The game is scary enough that both of the girls like to hide under blankets for much of it as dinosaurs tend to jump out at you rather suddenly.  It’s not a horror game, but it is an intense one.

It was a really nice day together as a family.  And that wraps up February, 2016 and it wraps up our second month in Greece.